How Mobile Video App Socialcam Used Facebook To Explode To 75 Million Users In 15 Months

Socialcam is a mobile
video app that lets users make and share quick films. It launched
15 months ago and received 1 million downloads in its first six
months.

Now Socialcam has about 8 million daily active users—more than 8X
the size of its closest competitor, Viddy, which raised a round of
financing at a $300 million+ valuation.

Between its website and its app, more than 75 million people use
Socialcam.

We spoke with Socialcam cofounder Michael Seibel. He told us how Socialcam has
kept up its explosive growth and how it has utilized Facebook's
Open Graph.

Here are the key takeaways:

Socialcam was able to scale to 75 million users by
utilizing both its website and its app. Unlike
Instagram, where the site merely
encourages app downloads, Socialcam has a fully-functioning
website where users can view videos people have made. The 75 million users
are either people who use the website, people who have
downloaded the app, or both

12-15 percent of people who have downloaded the app (13
million) are using it every day.

Socialcam's website is already one of the most
trafficked video sites in the world. Alexa ranks
Socialcam.com as the 139th site in
the U.S.

Facebook timeline and Open Graph integration
have helped make Socialcam explode. Whenever a user
watches or creates a video on Socialcam, the activity appears
on their Facebook feeds.

Socialcam has grown so quickly, it's had to scale from
15 servers to 150 servers in the past 45 days.

MS: I was the CEO of Justin.tv and my cofounders were senior
engineers there. We came up with the idea at Justin.tv in
the fall of 2010.

We had an iPhone app that allowed people to stream live
videos, and all of our users said the same thing: "We use your
app to stream video clips, not live video." They said they tried
using the YouTube and Facebook app to stream clips, but
all of them failed.

We thought, "Why are we working on live video for the phone when
no one has solved the problem of video for the phone?"
We got to work on Socialcam and launched in March 2011. It got
its first 1 million downloads in six months, so we decided to
spin it out of Justin.tv.

How big is the Socialcam team?

Four people — three cofounders and one community manager.

Why did Socialcam go through Y Combinator when Justin.tv is already a
well-known name?

There were three reasons we did Y Combinator. The first is
everyone who goes through YC can't help but speed up. We wanted
to make sure we instilled a startup pace at Socialcam.

Now we push code as fast as humanly possible. We have 2-4 week
development cycles and even faster cycles on our website.

The second thing was advice. YC sees soooo many companies and
understands a lot of potential issues startups will confront. We
wanted access to the amazingly smart group of people.

Last, I'd been through YC before with Justin.tv, but my
cofounders hadn't. It was a perfect opportunity for them to get
the YC experience.

For a while, you and your competitor Viddy were neck and
neck in terms of downloads and traffic. Now you've blown past
them by 8-fold. How are you keeping the momentum?

MS: We're almost three times bigger than our next biggest
competitor in terms of monthly traffic. In terms of daily, we're
8 times bigger.

There are three big factors in our continuous growth. The
first, which is hard to ignore, is Facebook. Our integration with
Facebook has been ridiculously powerful. Users can share the
videos they're viewing on Socialcam, and that has been huge for
us.

The second thing is the fact that we allow people to take videos
without any limits. We hear time and time again that people
who have tried other apps come to us because we have no time
limits.

Most people don't take videos. So when they're using one of these
apps, it's a new experience. We have a theory that most
people who create mobile videos are documenters, not directors.
If you're a documenter you're taking a video of something in the
real world you want to capture. If you're a director,
you're trying to create something in the real world.

Imagine a birthday party. You're going to take a video when
everyone sings happy birthday. You can't tell everyone, "Sing
really fast because I have to get it in this video!" So Socialcam
doesn't have time limits.

The third is scaling. Socialcam had to scale from 15 servers to
150 servers in the past 45 days. If my cofounders, who are
the engineers, weren't able to pull that off, it wouldn't matter
how viral we were or how well we were serving our customers.
Everything wouldn't work.

Being able to keep up with this level of growth wouldn't have
been possible five years ago.

Here's a screen grab
of a video someone shot and published on
Socialcam.

How has Facebook specifically accelerated your growth?

If you look at one of our competitors [Viddy], it got one of
Facebook's first video timeline integrations 45 days before we
did. It was actually featured in a blog post by Facebook.

We use Open Graph to allow people to share the videos they're
taking and allow people to share videos they're watching, similar
to Spotify's integration. It's a powerful platform and solves one
of the classic problems in video creation — you're going to get
way more usage on the consumption side than the creation side.

If you look at a photography startup like Instagram, you're going
to get enough creation from people to build viral flow. If
you look at a video product, there's much more consumption than
creation even though we do have a huge percentage of users who
actually create videos.

The Facebook integration allows people to share videos they're
watching, which has been great for us.

What kind of engagement and user numbers does Socialcam
have?

We're at approximately 75 million users. That number falls into
two camps: people who use Socialcam from their websites and
people using our mobile app and our website.

Our mobile app has been top 10 in the App Store for the past
30-45 days. We have about 13 million app
downloads. Of the 75 million users, about 13 million
use the website and app. The difference just use the Socialcam
website. The website has been a huge driver for new
downloads.

Unlike Instagram, where the website only advertises the app, our
website allows users to watch videos people are creating and see
the most popular videos created via a complete feed of all the
people they're following. It also allows users to follow
new people and follow featured people, like celebrities.
You can do everything on our website you can do in the app except
create videos.

We're getting approximately 12-15 percent of total download base
using the app every day.

Some Socialcam users have more than 1 million followers.
How does that work?

When someone posts a Socialcam video, all of their followers get
an instant notification. MC Hammer is number 2 right now on the
Socialcam leaderboard. He has over 1 million followers.
When MC Hammer takes a video, 1 million people's phones get
notifications around the world.

Users opt into this. They can also turn off alerts.

What's next for Socialcam?

We have some big new features coming out soon, but I can't really
talk about them yet. Our goal right now is to really
educate people about the mobile video movement. We think
there should be 1000X more video creators than there are right
now. And we think the technology is there to make that happen,
all we need to do is build the product.